I am holed up in my sister’s friend Cat’s basement, in Brooklyn: a spacious underground lair where time is precise, artificial, and indistinct, weather nonexistent, and the outside world remote. The windows would show me snow, falling steadily and silently, were I positioned to look out of them. MJ is in bed with her leg propped up, recuperating, watching videos. I’m writing code and occasionally running errands.

Later today I have an appointment at the Apple store in Soho; MJ’s laptop has some problem with its speakers. I intend to buy an iPod while I’m there – my first digital music device, in fact – which should keep me sane on the flight to Australia, and serve as a replacement for the Rover’s CD player when I get back.

I had a nice week and a half at home, and now I’m in New York for a week, visiting my sister MJ.

Airtrain from JFK to Jamaica Station, LIRR from Jamaica to Flatbush, subway from Flatbush to Grand Army Plaza, then I walk… makes me feel good to be in a city with a solid transit system. Every time I go through Seatac the new light rail system looks a little closer to completion. The terminal station was all lit up last night, lights blazing up and out, looking swoopy and futuristic and hopeful.

I went to the caucuses yesterday with my housemates. We had a big pre-caucus party, with bagels and coffee, precinct maps, and campaign literature. A dozen of our friends came over and discussed their opinions, and then we all headed over to the caucus location. It was a huge, boisterous, excited, standing-room-only crowd – great to see so many people out putting their energy into a democratic process.

It’s nice to be home. I took four out-of-town trips last month, ending with back-to-back Austin visits, and now I am ready for some rest. I get to spend a week and a half settled before I fly to New York for a week with MJ.

Once I’m home from that, I’ll have another week to unpack and repack before jetting off to Australia for a two week vacation. Southern hemisphere, late summer: beaches, highways, big coastal city, maybe even some desert. I’ll be landing in Melbourne, meeting up with Stefanie, and taking trips out from there. I plan to drive the Great Ocean Road, go surfing, maybe go explore some of the southern islands.

The Rover is unwell; its engine oozes thin white smoke after it’s been warmed up – some kind of coolant leak. I dropped it off at the shop this afternoon, so I’m back in a rental car for the weekend. This time, I opted for the damage waiver.

As has become usual lately, I stepped off the plane with a batch of new clothing sketches in my notebook. There’s nothing to do on a plane but read or think, and I guess airport people-watching followed by enforced thinking time gets my brain in the right mode for fashion design. I’m spending the evening on a new project: an experiment, with silk and flowing lines.

I found a solution for the excess fabric: start a new project. I’ve roughed out a new lined, fur-trimmed vest, using the same design as the one I just made for Michael H. This one is tailored for me, however, with silver and white fabric, a little brocade trim, and some really luscious white fur. This should go well with the blue/white/silver raver side of my wardrobe.

Five months later, I finally have last year’s Burning Man bins unpacked.

In other news, I now have two entire bins full of leftover fabric. Something must be done. Perhaps I should think about setting up a shop space somewhere… perhaps, oh, maybe, in Ballard, near the bridge…

I finished Michael’s vest off with a set of brass clasps, in place of buttons. I had a little trouble getting them positioned, but it came out fine in the end. He came by to pick it up on his way out of town for a weekend trip, and it was great to see him feeling good and excited about wearing it. This project was just ambitious enough to stretch me a bit without requiring a lot of backtracking, and I am very happy with the way it came out.

Now of course it’s time to think up the next project. I’ll poke around in my remnants box after dinner and see if anything inspires me.

We have gone past software simulations of hardware devices and moved on to Web mimicries of software simulations of hardware devices. Here’s a pixel-perfect Roland TR-909 simulator as a Flash app. The idea of using a mouse to control little digital knobs is just as silly in Flash as it always has been in normal music software, but it does yield a ridiculously accurate simulation of the original machine.

I have decided to buy a typewriter. I want one of the older Underwood portables with three key-banks, though a Corona 3 would work too. I don’t have an immediate use for this machine, but the current fashion for cutting up old typewriters and making things out of their keys makes me think I should pick mine up before good, working machines become expensive and hard to find.

In a piece of nostalgia-driven engineering as awesome as it is pointless, here’s a 512k Mac upgraded to run Mac OS X (by replacing its logic board with an entire Mac Mini).

Someone left a pile of laser projector hardware at my door while I was gone over Christmas and New Year’s, but neglected to include a note. I thought it was Llew R., but I mentioned it to him at Dona’s party tonight, and he had no idea what I was talking about. A mystery! There are a couple of audio processor kits, a three-mirror projector board, and some kind of control device. Did you leave this stuff for me, or know who did?